Nudge your Workforce: A Study on the Effectiveness of Task Notification Strategies in Enterprise Mobile Crowdsourcing

As crowdsourcing gains popularity, organisations seek ways to systematically and reliably involve their workforce with data processing pipelines. Mobile crowdsourcing allows for opportunistic task executions and thus, potentially, for higher throughput. However, how to engage and to retain employees in enterprise crowdsourcing campaigns is still an open research topic. This paper discusses the results of a study performed in IBM Benelux. We surveyed 93 employees to discover the factors that might affect engagement in mobile enterprise crowdsourcing. The survey informed the design of an experiment that aimed at investigating the effectiveness of different task notification strategies. We studied how factors such as time and context of notification can affect the participation and retention of employees. Results show that break times are the most suitable for crowd work, and that ``aggressive'' notification strategies act as deterrent for participation, while moderate yet regular nudges are the most likely to retain contributors.